Verbatim

Within this environment things come out unformatted. It's useful for showing examples of typed input and provides a way of printing characters that have a special meaning for L^ATEX.

\begin{tex2html_preform}verbatim46#\end{tex2html_preform}

produces

caret is ^, tilde is ~ and backslash is \

If you just want to quote a few characters, use \verb|quoted text|. The characters delimiting the quote can be anything as long as they are the same.